Boy howdy, those tiny houses sure do look cool. I’m with you on this. They’re like dollhouses that you get to live in. Everything is so neat, so compact, so pragmatic. Looking at your existing home or apartment, you start to think, LOOK AT ALL THIS WASTEFULNESS. Do I really need all that floor near my bed? What am I doing with it except walking on it in order to get into bed? Do I really need that much counter space? Yes, I have a bowl of fruit on the counter, but surely that’s an improper and extravagant misapplication of three-dimensional space. What if I could just store my fruit under the sink, or in a secret ceiling cubby hole, or in a quaintly hollow tree stump outside? Are hallways anything but just the middleman of architecture? Do I truly require this much oxygen? My own house suddenly feels bloated, like a gassy belly. It’s cluttered and chaotic and — I mean, is this a house, or is it the airless infinity of outer space? Right? Am I right?

The tiny house is like a diet.

You look at it, and you think: I can do that. I can get healthy. I will juice cleanse and then eat asparagus and chia seeds for the rest of my life, and sweet hot fuck, I’ll be healthy as a horse. A robot horse. A robot horse who will live forever and be the handsomest robot horse ever. I’ll lose this weight. People will admire my lean frame and my culinary judiciousness. I’ll eat like a rabbit. I will defy gluten and cast sugar into the sea and JUST SAY NO to pizzas and ice creams and tacos and all I will eat are these rods of asparagus and these spoonfuls of chia seeds and once a week for dessert I will treat myself with these delicious crackers made from ancient grains (amaranth, motherfuckers!). For sweetness, I will mist them with agave syrup the way the lady at the fragrance counter mists you with perfume as you walk past.

I will diet, and I will be good.

I will tiny house, and I will be good.

* * *

I started watching your show at my wife’s behest.

We used to watch House Hunters until we learned the whole thing was a crass, reality show lie, and then we watched House Hunters International because even if it was a lie you got to see how they took showers in Iceland or what atrocity they called a “kitchen” in Hungarian apartments and of course we’d occasionally wiggle our toes in other shows, like that horrible one where people who are way too rich actually try to buy entire fucking islands because sure, why not, buy a whole fucking island, assholes, but if you’re not turning it into a villainous fortress then I just don’t understand you.

One day my wife said, “You need to watch this new show.”

And I said, what is it, and does it star Guy Fieri, and will he milk the donkey sauce from his pubic beard into a chicken stock in order to make the soup that takes us all down to the FLAVORPOCALYPSE. And she said, no, no, “It’s a new House Hunters show,” and I thought, well, where else can they go? Maybe House Hunters New York Apartments where we follow a broke single person trying to fight rat-swarms in order to find a rent-controlled outhouse-sized apartment for less than the cost of a mansion in Minnesota.

“It’s not that,” she said. But it was close. It was very close.

Enter you people. Hunters of tiny houses. Cave-humans once stalked lions on the veldt, but you intrepid hunters track itty-bitty homes — houses compressed down like coal until they become the shining diamonds of Spartan living.

You are the tiny house hunters. Er, not that you yourselves are tiny — far from it, as some of you are quite large-sized, like many of us humans! No, no, the tininess is embodied in the houses you seek. These homes are magnificently small. Many are 200, 300 square feet — 400 max. You get a bedroom, a kitchen, a bathroom, maybe a living room or sitting area, but all those rooms are smooshed together, stacked on top of one another, or are merged into mutant aberrations (“WELCOME TO THE KITCHEN WHERE THE SINK IS YOUR SHOWER AND THE OVEN IS YOUR CLOTHES DRYER.”) It’s not an apartment. It’s like a regular house hit with a shrink ray.

The normal house made Lilliputian.

Some look like little cabins! Others like chic trailers! Others still are shipping containers, or hobbit houses, or weird Transformers that expand and contract like a breathing lung.

I find that there exist two overall categories of tiny house hunters.

One group of you is the lone individual. You’re maybe young, an artist, with lots of student loan debt, and you tell us all the lie that you’re going to buy the tiny home and buy some property with it, except the truth is, your tiny home will forever haunt the yard of one of your siblings because that’s where you plant it. Or maybe you’re older — a musician gone to pasture or an aging hipster or a yarn lady — and you’re divorced or your spouse has perished in the usual way and now you just want to pare down your life. I understand that.

Another group of you are the couples.

Oh, the couples.

Two people who think they can co-habitate in a space roughly the size of the Keebler Elf Tree. Some of you are also older: you’re retiring and you are embracing austerity in your later years. One of you is perhaps way more on board than the other with living in this adorable little tomb, and that’s fine. Maybe you’re a younger couple instead, and if that’s the case, you probably have like, four kids and two dogs and you think ha ha ha that this is going to be good for your family, don’t you? Because sure, kids and animals like nothing more than being crammed together in a piano crate, forced to share their limited oxygen while Mommy and Daddy make clumsy, grunting love in the casket-sized open-air loft above everybody’s heads, and the dogs are barking, and the kids are fighting, and Mommy and Daddy are rutting like wild boars and yay, family.

I watch this show, though, and no matter who you are, I’m always a little amazed at your reactions. As if you don’t actually know what a tiny house is? You start out by saying, “We want to simplify and downsize,” or “We want our family to be closer,” and then you get into these tiny houses and start changing your tune. You say things like, “This is cramped,” or “Where’s the shower?” or “What is a composting toilet?” You then say, “This is cute,” but you say it in the way someone says it when they’re looking at someone wearing a homemade sweater. You don’t mean it. You look terrified, like an otter trapped in a cardboard tube.

So, I’ve seen a number of these episodes now, and I’d like to walk you through some of the realities you are likely to face upon procuring and dwelling within one of these tiny houses.

First, the toilet. We just need to get this out of the way right now. It’s very possibly a composting toilet. Now, if you’re a hipster like me, you think, HEY COMPOSTING IS GOOD, but I do want you to understand, you’re basically keeping your poop. I mean, we all keep our poop somewhere. Mine is underneath my backyard. But yours will be closer. More intimate. It will be mixed with sawdust or coconut hulls or, I dunno, the ashes of your parents, but you’ll keep it close and it will turn into dirt that conceivably you can use to grow flowers. That’s very nice. But make no mistake, whereas right now you poop into a bowl and pull a lever and the poop is whisked away by forces unknown, in a composting toilet you mostly just poop and then kinda… get up and walk away. I say this only because many of you seem quite surprised. As long as you don’t mind pooping like you’re living at a Lilith Fair, you should be fine.

Second, the toilet. Nobody has brought this up on the show, but I’m going to now: if you live with other humans, eventually one of you is going to take the kind of deuce-evacuation that could conceivably destroy a marriage. Normally you’d be fine, because normally you’d be living in a normal-sized human house where you have a door to close and a fan and several rooms or even floors of separation. But now you dwell in an elf-house and now you and all the other elves are going to share in that dump you just took. You’re going to live with it for a while. Everyone is going to become intimately familiar with one another’s bathroom peccadilloes, okay?

Third, okay, actually, it’s also possible that the toilet is an outhouse. Which is great and fine but please be aware that spiders love outhouses. That’s all I’m gonna say.

Fourth, your bed is going to be a claustrophobic morgue-drawer nightmare. The ceiling will be three feet above your head and that’s only if the mattress is of the same material they make diapers out of. If it is a proper mattress, your nose is probably going to be pressed against the top margins of your tiny house. Beds, actual human beds, are fucking huge. Perhaps extravagantly so, I dunno, but we have left the era where we could comfortably sleep on a pile of reeds on the hard rocky earth and now we sleep on giant mattress configurations that are basically as big as half of a tiny house. If you want to practice what it’s like sleeping in a tiny house, sleep in one of your drawers, or in the crawlspace under your existing normal-sized home.

Fifth, many bathrooms do not have sinks. So, what this means is, if you want to shave, you will shave in the kitchen sink. That’s face and legs and pits and crotch or whatever you shave, if you shave it. Also, that means if you take one of those aforementioned Herculean/Sisyphean dumps, to wash your hands will require leaving that room. Also sometimes the toilet is in the shower. And sometimes there isn’t a shower. Other times there is a bathtub outside because sure why the fuck not, go bathe with the raccoons and scrub your body with dry leaves, cave-person.

Sixth, yes, that is a tiny closet, and it will hold no more than the suit or dress in which they will bury you. Did you believe that a tiny house would give you a huge closet? The only way your tiny house has a huge closet is if you use your tiny house as a closet. Which I’m sure some people do.

Seventh, no, of course you’re not going to get full-size appliances. That’s an EZ-Bake oven you’re looking at. The sink accommodates a single coffee mug. The washing machine washes Barbie clothes. You need to stop asking about full-size appliances. Actually, if someone ever makes a bingo card for Tiny House Hunters, that’ll be one of the things that goes on it.

Eighth, okay, listen, people with kids and dogs. You want “family bonding time,” but what your kids see is “hostage-taking time.” This is like, “cult bunker time.” Your kids do not want to live that close to you. Or to each other. Your dogs want to run and jump and — I mean, they’re not hamsters, you understand that, right? They’re not hamsters, and you’re not diminutive little fairy creatures, and tiny houses are not houses, they’re GI Joe playsets, they’re hipster sepulchers, they’re absurdist shoebox dioramas. I admire your desire to lean into austerity and trim the fat from your life, but unless you have a huge property, shoving a family of 6 into one of these turtle terrariums is something some people have to do, but they wouldn’t choose to do it, y’know? I lived with my mother and father and a dog and imagining growing up in one of those things is giving me retroactive trauma — my bowels are clenching, turning my innards to ice water.

Ninth, a lot of those tiny houses are pretty dang expensive for what you get. You think they’re cheap but seriously you could probably rent a hella nice apartment or even buy a couple of cool wizard vans to live in for that price. Just an FYI!

* * *

What I’m saying is —

I worry about you, tiny house hunter people.

I worry that this is all some kind of pyramid scheme, that it’s like Amway or alpacas, that there’s some unseen Ponzi scheme at play here.

I worry that after a year living in one of those tiny houses, you’ll need to buy another tiny house, and then another, and another, until you’re just stacking tiny house atop tiny house in a teetering Jenga tower of hobbit homes and shipping containers and then one day it falls and crushes your whole hipster family.

I worry that in two years HGTV will air a follow-up WHERE ARE THEY NOW special and 75% of you will have died in murder-suicide schemes, having gone mad not in the labyrinthine expanse of The Shining hotel but rather gone cuckoo bananapants inside the claustrophobic MRI machine you decided to call home.

Like I said, buying a tiny house is like a diet.

Or, rather, it’s like going on a fad diet.

Austerity sounds virtuous. And for some people, it is the thing that motivates them, it is a part of who they are. For the rest of us, not so much. Fad diets often ask you to sacrifice things to which you’ve grown accustomed — and often things your body actually needs — under the auspices of getting healthy. I WILL CLEANSE MY BODY WITH JUICE AND SPROUTED GRAIN you think, and then someone walks by you eating a hamburger and some precious thing inside you snaps and next thing you know you’re on the city bus killing and eating people.

Tiny house living will be like this. It’s good for some. Single people in particular — I mean, hey, they do it in New York (usually because they have to, though, not because they want to). But for the rest of us, while we may find some value in paring down and cutting the wheat from the chaff, a tiny house may be a bridge too far. No, we don’t need to live in 3,000 square feet, but we also don’t need to live in an airless, soul-crushing box. Many of us will find joy in having a little leg room when we’re sitting on a toilet, or having a place to put our stuff, or having a table at which we dine instead of standing around holding plates and staring at each other. Many of us like having separate rooms instead of BATHROOM-KITCHENS. It isn’t that romantic having a refrigerator that’s also a toilet, or a bed that’s also a bathtub.

Maybe a tiny house is for you.

But watching this show and hearing your comments and looking at the terrified countenances plastered to your skulls, I’m thinking — nnnyeah, maybe not so much.

Be well, tiny house hunters.

And remember: you don’t actually have to live in a tiny house.

Love,

Me

P.S. most people are trying to move into bigger houses what the fuck is wrong with you most people only live in tiny houses because they have to, you privileged turd-necks

Lots of people are capable of living in small quarters. Even for extended periods. I ain’t one of ’em though. I need space for my junk, and my tools and my projects. Other than that, my actual living space could be pretty small 😉
I agree that many people spend too much on their tiny house builds. But I disagree that you can get more for your money buying an RV. RV trailers are made too cheaply to stand up to permanent use, and they deteriorate rapidly, That said, I get what the author is picking at.
Tiny houses might be better used in groups of three. Build three tiny houses and keep one in the woods, one at the beach, and one in town. That’s my plan, but mine will be on wheels, sheep wagon style.

I’m not gunna bash you for your post (it’s somewhat funny if you take it the right way) but want to say that I built and live in a tiny house, have done for 3.5 years with a boyfriend and a 65 lb dog (we all still like each other) and it’s just really not that big of a deal. Positives and negatives, it’s the most practical thing for some of us who don’t like paying for things we can’t afford.

Brilliant, Chuck. It’s like you said everything I’ve been thinking or saying. Loved the mom and dad rutting and grunting. That particular show probably blew my whole interest in the show. And don’t get me started on the bathroom…

I watch this show. And every. single. episode. I find myself thinking “yanno? The only way to live tiny is to have some land and spend a lot of time outside.” I live in North Texas. For roughly two weeks a year, you are comfortable outside. Other than that, It’s blistering hot and both air and land swarm with blood-sucking vermin and stinging insects. Mosquitoes, fleas, ticks, chiggers, fireants, wasps, the works. Not for me.

This is the correct answer. As a Canadian, there’s probably a month out of the year where I want to spend the majority of my time outside. The rest of the year? Not so much. One good, heavy snowfall and you’d be entombed like Tutankhamen, poking air holes through your windows with broomsticks to make sure you didn’t suffocate. Lunacy. Tiny houses are probably fine if you’re in California or wherever it is that people get all excited about three drops of rain, but everybody else is S.O.L.

A better alternative to avoid property taxes is building your tiny house on wheels, as in a converted semi cargo trailer. You have the option of being able to move lock, stock, and … plus it is better built than a camper. Definitely suited for single occupancy, for retired loners, not for social types (arguable).

That was a guy in Austin, Texas. It was a pretty nice little setup actually, but even though I’m a BIG proponent of tiny house living, a dumpster is just a tad too far for me
.http://dumpsterproject.org/

Loved this! But STILL can’t wait to build and OWN my Tiny House. (I want to be a “Yarn Lady”!) I married into a McMansion–and I will be FINE leaving it behind! Now, the dog? She’ll come with me–and we’ll be just fine. Thanks for the fun read! I’ll be ready to make peace with poop and poop-flowers, thanks to you!

I haven’t laughed so hard since…well, it’s been a looong time! I’ve not seen the show, but have read some self-consciously sanctimonious articles about tiny houses. The whole time I kept thinking, “It’s like camping, but worse! You never get to go home!”

Many years ago, there was an article in Mother Earth News about “micro-housing”. Basically it was about putting a small shed like structure in the back yard of your regular house and cramming your aging parents, or your adult children, or your ex, into it (the concept of using it for an ex was that it made it easier for the kids to visit.) Intriguing idea, but I like the change of venue you get from going in a different room, looking out a window on a different view, or being able to lounge somewhere other than my bed.

Former NYer here….I’ve watched a few episodes of THH, and each time shook my head at how inefficiently most of the homes were designed. Most times a home was considered tiny if it was 500 sq ft or less. Most of them had all kinds of nesting/multiple use built-in, and ladders to sleeping lofts.
I lived in a 450 sq ft apartment, two rooms: large bedroom(big enough for a king-sized bed), and a long rectangular living room with a kitchenette and dining space. Sure Fisher-Price made toy stoves and dishwashers bigger than mine, and I couldn’t cook anything bigger than a 5lb chicken in the oven, but I had ample storage, lots of closets, and didn’t have to flip the bed over to eat dinner off of it.
Tiny homes can work for one or two people, if designed smartly, not just cleverly.
That being said, I giggle-snorted though the article, and made my bf read it as well (we’ve upgraded to a 920 sq place, lol)

OMG! I laughed so hard…then I sent the link to at least 30 people. Every time I see a tiny house I wonder how people can permanently live in them – especially when they living someplace with drastic season changes and cannot escape to the outside for extra room. Too small. I live in a 10 meter bus (75 sq ft living space) with all the things one needs and tons of storage space, plus outside lockers for stuff so all our goodies travel with us. Done it for nearly 6 years and have never had second thoughts. Here in NZ we are big into motorhome living so we can take advantage of all the beautiful places to stay.

OMG!!! This is the funniest thing I have ever read and I agree with all of it. Where do these shows get these people? Do they not have one single living brain cell in their head? And, if you really want to go “tiny” buy an RV or trailer. They are much more stable (most of these tiny houses are like VW buses…and we all know how they used to just fall over on the curves), they know how to make storage areas, they have a real toilet and a holding tank, a real shower and, yes, a real stove with an oven and a real frig. Get a clue people. If you are going to spend that much money then spend it wisely on something proven, not these little boxes on wheels that have nothing to do with reality.

Our family of four live in 1100 sq ft (our house is 24 x 24 feet), including a staircase which takes up an inordinate amount of space on both floors. It is adorable, and just about the perfect size, if only our previous house (in a way waaaay cheaper city) had not been so big as to allow us to collect too much stuff. But it is a real house, with lovely woodwork, a kitchen which takes up more than a quarter of the ground floor, and a real, working normal bathroom.

A big chuck out and a second toilet would make it perfect. My housing size formula is 500 sf for a couple, plus 200sf for each child in the family.

Awesome formula! According to that our newest home (just downsized slightly) of 2300 sq ft is perfect for our family of 10. 🙂

Also, we lived in a 1300 sq ft home on all one level when we had our 7th baby. Didn’t feel tiny at all. We laugh hysterically when watching shows like this, especially the inefficiency of everything. My husband keeps saying he would love to see what “tiny house” someone could custom build for our large family that would actually work. We’re pretty minimal, but by the time you add a table for 12, 4 sets of bunk beds, indoor playspace for our snowy winters, and a kitchen than can accommodate 4 cooks (who are used to working in tight spaces), you basically end up with our current house. 🙂

I also feel most people that fall in love with romantic idea of tiny homes and have never lived in anything THAT small.600-700 sq ft is about the smallest i could tolerate long term and thats by myself.also ,as was mentioned, the skyhigh prices on some of these tiny homes… 300-400 sq ft of living space and its $350 a sqft?? Plus you still need land. With building codes now days i also think people would have trouble with some of these designs maybe??so just find an existing small house(600sqft) … It will cost you have as much and you’ll be hsppier too 🙂

Essentially, my attic apartment could be considered at “tiny-house.” It’s perfect for me and the cat, but when I get married it will not be big enough for two people and two cats. Tiny houses are perfect for a single guy like me, but I think they are like starter homes and small apartments, eventually you grow out of them and need something bigger.

I lived in a Single Wide for ten years. I loved it.I had an actual bath tub. I lived and worked full time in a 12 x 12 cube for the next 3. I have been Homeless for 2 years and 20 days. If enough people buy tiny houses I can stop being a 60 year old couch surfer and rent something within 200 miles of where I have spent the past 40 years of my life and keep my books, rather than waiting to get my Social Security and trying to buy an RV to live in. It would be nice to be able to fit a yoga mat and a dog on the floor.

I watch the show all the time and at the end of the show opening footage and VO they ask “Could you live in a tiny house?” Each time I answer, “No,” but I still watch to learn the motivation and to see the designs. What I have never heard anyone address on the show is tiny house depreciation. I doubt that the buyers, in most cases, recoup their original investment when they decide to move “up” to a permanent, non-mobile home.

Most people seem to have no concept of what a composting toilet is or does. There are a few different kinds. Some work by incineration, in fact it is my understanding that most of the commercially-built tiny homes have this kind. They don’t smell, they actually have an end product that is useful and they don’t waste water.
Really rv parks don’t allow them? They, and you all, prefer pooping into a chemical toilet and producing a toxic sludge of value to nobody?
Another kind, which we use at our off the grid property, is a simple bucket with peat moss or sawdust (placed in a box with a toilet seat cover) in whatever kind of room or outhouse you desire. You poop, you cover with peat moss. Once again no mess, no smell or flies or anything nasty. When full you empty bucket (good lord, just don’t look, if you are so squeamish) onto compost heap with the rest of your compostables. Cover with straw. Once again, no smell.
“Real toilets”, the apex of civilization. Clean drinking water is becoming an ever scarcer resource, defecating what little we have left is lunacy.
For those with minds capable of being opened, I recommend reading “The Humanure Handbook” by Joe Jenkins

It’s called reality. Most towns won’t allow the square footage. They force you into having “so many square feet” so they can get x amount of tax dollars. Not going to happen. It’s cute, and some could live in them but not up in the Northeast here – not allowed

-First of all, don’t plan on hosting Thanksgiving, Christmas or any birthday parties.
-Resale? Forget it.
-Hope you or your kin don’t ever break a leg or ankle or have difficulty moving around. Also, don’t get old.
-I hope everyone in the house enjoys the same music and TV shows, because there’s only one choice for everyone.
-Enjoy living at your local Laundromat.
-Enjoy having no personal, private space. Ever.

[…] I manifested the true power of the Internet and wrote an “open letter” to the intrepid reality stars of Tiny House Hunters, and I have only fallen deeper down the rabbit hole on this show since. I just can’t quit […]

I practically peed laughing through this whole snarky but spot-on article! I got curious about the tiny house movement a couple of years ago, having many architects as friends. Most architects enjoy a spirited interest in the challenges involved in good tiny house design, but few would ever live in one. They are like lab studies.

Of late tiny living has been on my radar as a result of the crazy story-that-went-viral about the Naugler family of 13 in rural Kentucky, who had their 10 kids removed by CPS last May for living in negligent conditions. They spun it that it was about their alternative, off-grid, unschooling and tiny lifestyle. But there were 12 of them crammed into a 3 walled, less than 300 s.f. shack with only an outdoor rocket stove and dirt-floored kitchen.

To get their kids back, they needed to provide more appropriate shelter. So they bought an Amish shed, just under 400 s.f., where the 13 of them now live, which includes the parents, and 11 kids aged 17 to only 6 months. Their eldest two sons moved to the former dwelling, the 3-walled shack, to have their own place. Oh my God, I wonder why.

All 13 use one outhouse (not a pit, but utilizing buckets that must be hauled when full—gah!— to some frightening “compost are”). There’s no running water on the property, they are off-grid although they have gas generator and solar panels. It is the worst example of psychotic tiny living I have ever seen. They claim it is by choice. (they were nearly homeless). All I can say is……….I’m so sorry for the kids.

If you are curious about this train wreck of off-grid tiny living, Google Joseph (Joe) and Nicole Naugler.

@mitzilanni: I have looked at the Humanure Handbook.
But toxicology studies show that human feces takes at least 2 years to break down and no longer be harmful as a fertilizer. It is still not recommended for use on other than flowers. Read about “night soil.”

The other issue with the poop is that it has to be contained so it doesn’t contaminate the groundwater (an issue in all areas other than desert climes). There are also issues of flies, the odor, and/or animal and human exposure to the poop pile. And accumulating this mountain of poop to do what? Fertilize the pansies? I say, go septic or go home.

Other issues that people ignore when looking at the charm exuding from staged tiny house photos:
—where the hell is the water coming from?
—are you on grid? If not, where the heck are your solar panels and inevitable generators for when the sun don’t shine? We never see that in the glossy spreads about adorable tiny homes.

Tiny living has a false allure of being a cheaper, more ecological and freeing lifestyle. I wouldn’t find hauling water, gas for the generator in wintertime, and buckets of poop to the compost pile to be terribly freeing. It is ecological but cheaper is a relative term. If you get a really tricked out tiny house, they can run well over $100k so it’s only cheap as a long term investment.

Michelle, you may have looked at the Humanure Handbook, but you obviously haven’t read it. I have four years of first hand experience with humanure. As stated in the book, we let the pile sit for two years before applying to the vegetable garden. While it does stink while defecating (just like it does in any toilet) and adding to the compost pile, it does not stink or attract flies if managed correctly.